Considering renting out my house

paddles

Sorry, don't know where this fits.

Am currently considering the possibility of moving jobs which involves moving location. I have my own home but I would either have to sell/ rent it out. Selling is not an option as I'm in neg equity so really would have to rent it out.

I have a couple of questions:
1. I am not keen on the idea of landlordism particularly and will be over 2hours drive away so was wondering about using a letting agency to look after it. I imagine that this would be ridiculously expensive, would it? Or what service do they offer?

2. I would prob need to leave all my furniture (some of it is quite decent) in the house as would have nowhere to put anything. Not sure I fancy paying for storage and/or also buying cheapie furniture cos I'm renting out. So would hope to get a family who would look after the place reasonably. Are there letting agencies that have a better rep for screening for potential tenants than others? I know there are no guarentees, but thought maybe (and would prob pay for the privilege) that some agencies might take more care than others, look for references etc etc. Do they ever check the place for you if you pay them?

3. What's the deal with tax on rental income? I will have to rent a new property for myself as is, so was hoping that I could get as much as possible for my house to go towards the mortgage.

4. Any other advice? Am I going to be giving myself alot of grief? I don't HAVE to move but I would like to move back eventually to my homeplace and now an opportunity has arisen. I really would prefer to not have the stress of landlordism but there seems to be no other option open to me. I hope to get a family in who might be more likely to stay than individuals.

Thanks!

bassey

Probably better suited here http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=38

Lawrence1895

Some more information about the house would be helpful, such as how many bedrooms, where abouts is the house, how much would the rent be

dudara

@bassey Please use the Report Post functionality to alert a moderator that a thread is in the wrong forum. Please do not point the poster to another forum as that can result in thread duplication.

Thread moved to Accomodation & Property

dudara

paddles

4 bed semi. The average rent for my area for 4 bed appears to be between 700 and 750. I have seen some on daft for 800 but i doubt i'd get that much.

Lawrence1895

paddles wrote: »

4 bed semi. The average rent for my area for 4 bed appears to be between 700 and 750. I have seen some on daft for 800 but i doubt i'd get that much.

So where exactly is the house?

€700-750 sounds reasonable though

I'm just asking, because I'm considering to move as well, but it has to be in Beaumont, Artane or Whitehall.

magneticimpulse

Out of all the places I rented from, the ones which were rented out via the Letting Agency were not strict at all. They never came around to the house to check up on things, only when we handed the keys back.

The houses which the landlord rented out directly to us, the landlord was in and out of the house quite often. I didnt mind so much as nothing to hide and in all honesty, it worked out better. He got his dad to do the gardening for us in the summer. I know you might be thinking why couldnt we do the garden ourselves...but sharing between 4 to 6 random adults, not everyone likes to maintain stuff like that. You might have one person who cuts the grass but then gives up because nobody else will help out.

The bathroom had a leaky pipe and the landlord was able to fix it or get someone in quickly. We needed a bigger fridge for "6" adults to share and he bought us one. He fixed the washing machine whenever it broke down.

I compare this to my 1st rental, in which the garden never got done and was overgrown. Ants took over the back room...and we mean a full on movie style ants of every size. One of the housemates never bothered to pay any of the bills...i felt bad and paid 1/3 of the bills...landlord tried to come after me and I said...sorry but dont take it out on me, its not my fault the other bloke wouldnt pay.

Overall nothing major happened with the rental furniture we had. Except for someone burned a hole in our carpet with their fag at a party one time. And the usual spilling of red wine on the carpet, walls etc. Housemates shagging on the furniture. Thats pretty much the worse that happened...and the landlord would not have known any different only if we pointed out the stains.

So it depends if you can live without the hassle. My experience was that if anything went wrong with the house, it was a pain to go through the estate agent and they didnt do a great job imo. At least if we needed something repaired we could quickly contact the landlord...its amazing how many times the washing machine leaked or we had some sort of major plumbing leak destroying the wooden floors...at least we could ring the landlord to come around that night...with estate agent it could be the weekend and you would have to wait til the Monday.

Inquitus

I explored the option of renting out my house recently.

The key take aways are only 75% of your Mortgage Interest is deductable, and obviously none of the principal. This means you need to rent the property out for a fair slice more than your monthly mortgage repayments to break even on it.

Say you had a 3 bed semi. Mortgage 1200 of which 200 was repaying the principle. This would leave you with 75% of 1000 euro interest reclaimable as an expense, so 750 euro.

If you were to rent the house for a year at 1200 euro a month:

rental income = 14,400

Costs Deductable
estate agents fees @ 6% = 864
Interest @ 12* 750@ = 9000
Depreciation of furniture = 1000

Total Costs: 10,864

Taxable rental income: 3,536 @ 40% if you are over the cutoff, not to mention you had to pay the Estate agent and the wear and tear out of the income anyways.

So as you can see using a rough example, renting your house for the same as the mortgage results in you having to swallow up to perhaps 4k in losses each year.

random numbers to show point.*

paddles

Wow, now I AM depressed.

My mortgage as it stands is 750 well, til the ECB goes up, so it will grow...
The average rent for this area is 750 for a 4 bed semi.

I'm a bit scared about the amount of time I might need to give to maintaining repairs as I would be living over 2 hours away.

Seems, much as I would love to move, I'm trapped nicely. Can't sell. Renting out sounds a right pain in the ass!

Thanks for the advice though.

Lawrence1895

Don't know, but if you could give us more details, such as where the house is, maybe somebody turns up to be a possible and good tenant

Treehouse72

Two quick comments:

> On letting agents, in my experience they provide a pretty terrible service, seeking to do the least possible work for their fee. My letting I agent (I am the renter) takes 2 or 3 emails before he even replies to me. He's never been around to check the place, and when I first viewed the property it was in a terrible, filthy state. A €100 professional clean would have had the place mint, but the agent obviously couldn't even be arsed doing that. It's only that I saw past the dirt and run-down nature of the place and could see how nice it could be that I was willing to take it and clean it myself. I daresay if it had been staged in the first place as I now have it the agent could have got more for it. So incredibly unprofessional. You really need to be careful with these people.

> Of the 2 or 3 amateur landlords I know, every one of them says the whole thing is much more stressful and difficult than they'd imagined, and the returns inevitably way below initial estimates. So if you are crunching the numbers, I'd err on the side of extreme pessimism to take account of the unforeseen.

paddles

Lars1916 wrote: »

Don't know, but if you could give us more details, such as where the house is, maybe somebody turns up to be a possible and good tenant

too early to go into detail. I need to decide whether to make the move or not at all.

paddles

Treehouse72 wrote: »

Two quick comments:

> On letting agents, in my experience they provide a pretty terrible service, seeking to do the least possible work for their fee. My letting I agent (I am the renter) takes 2 or 3 emails before he even replies to me. He's never been around to check the place, and when I first viewed the property it was in a terrible, filthy state. A €100 professional clean would have had the place mint, but the agent obviously couldn't even be arsed doing that. It's only that I saw past the dirt and run-down nature of the place and could see how nice it could be that I was willing to take it and clean it myself. I daresay if it had been staged in the first place as I now have it the agent could have got more for it. So incredibly unprofessional. You really need to be careful with these people.

> Of the 2 or 3 amateur landlords I know, every one of them says the whole thing is much more stressful and difficult than they'd imagined, and the returns inevitably way below initial estimates. So if you are crunching the numbers, I'd err on the side of extreme pessimism to take account of the unforeseen.

This is not a business proposition seeking returns. it's not an investment property. It's my home and if I move, I will be a tenant again. I would like to move location but can't afford to sell. I just don't want to be too badly off in the process. Nice idea moving to a nicer part of the country but maybe not if gonna be too much hassle and expense as I will need to rent a new place myself if I move.